SOURCE: Robertson, Ritchie. “Classicism and Its Pitfalls: Death in Venice.” In The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann, edited by Ritchie Robertson, pp. 95-106. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

[In the following essay, Robertson argues that in Death in Venice Mann “dramatizes the strengths, the weaknesses and the pitfalls of classicism, in its different versions, through the career of a writer dedicated to a classical ideal.”]

While staying in Venice with his wife and brother between 26 May and 2 June 1911, Thomas Mann, like his fictional Aschenbach, was fascinated by a handsome Polish boy whom he watched playing on the beach. This ‘personal and lyrical experience’, as Mann later described it in a much-quoted confessional letter, prompted the story Death in Venice.¹ And just as Mann's protagonist Aschenbach is inspired by the sight of Tadzio to write ‘a page and a half of exquisite prose’ on an unspecified problem of taste and culture (VIII, 493), so Mann wrote a short essay on his changing attitude to Wagner. Having idolised Wagner for many years, he confessed, he was now turning away from the composer's steamy Romanticism and towards a new classicism:

But if I consider the masterpiece of the twentieth century, I imagine something which differs from Wagner's profoundly and, I think, for the better—something decidedly logical, formal and clear, something at once severe and serene, evincing no less will-power than Wagner's, but intellectually cooler, more refined and even healthier, something that does not seek greatness in Baroque grandeur nor beauty in intoxication—a new classicism, I fancy, must come.

(X, 841-2)

His novella was itself intended to embody this ideal. Mann wished, for a time at least, to emulate certain contemporary writers who advocated ‘neoclassicism’ and who had the approval of Samuel Lublinski, a critic who had praised Buddenbrooks in a review that is quoted verbatim in Death in Venice (VIII, 453).² In retrospect, Mann's desire to climb on the bandwagon driven by such now-forgotten writers as Paul Ernst looks a very modest ambition. In his attempt to revive classicism, however, he also looked beyond his contemporaries and engaged with a long tradition in German literature, represented above all by the classical Goethe. We can also find in Mann's text traces of the new understanding of Greek sculpture pioneered by the eighteenth-century art historian Winckelmann, whose work formed an important basis for Goethe's classicism. In 1768 a shocked public learnt that Winckelmann had been murdered by a stranger at an inn in Trieste, and suspected (wrongly, it seems) a link with his known homosexuality. Winckelmann's death in Trieste may have helped to inspire Aschenbach's death in Venice.³ Mann alludes unmistakably to one of his own favourite writers, August von Platen (1796-1835), ‘the melancholy and enthusiastic poet’ whose Venetian sonnets come to Aschenbach's mind as he approaches Venice from the sea (VIII, 461). Although the precision of Platen's odes and sonnets gave him a reputation as ‘a man of severity, of cold symmetry, of classicist formalism’ (IX, 268), Mann knew that Platen was essentially a Romantic poet in his urge to express his own personality, especially his distress over the repeated experience of unrequited homosexual love. And finally, since Mann was steeped in the thought of Nietzsche, the story also registers the radical shift in the understanding of Greek culture instigated by Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (1872).

In paying homage to this tradition, Mann dramatises the strengths, the weaknesses and the pitfalls of classicism, in its different versions, through the career of a writer dedicated to a classical ideal. There was, above all, a contradiction between the public and private faces of classicism. Classical art is pre-eminently public. It is suited to public buildings, like Palladio's church of San Giorgio Maggiore which Aschenbach sees as he approaches Venice. In literature, it marks an exemplary public style which is to be shared and imitated, just as Aschenbach's formulaic style is held up as a model for schoolboys. But any real acquaintance with classical Greece soon reveals that it was a society markedly and disturbingly different from the modern cultures that claim it as an ancestor. In particular, homosexual relations between men and boys were an accepted part of Athenian life, whereas such a form of love has been officially frowned on since the rise of Christianity. Hence a preoccupation with classicism, especially with classical ideals of male beauty, has often enabled the homosexual imagination to find a satisfaction that was rare, dangerous or unattainable in reality, and in both life and literature visits to the Mediterranean have often brought about a sexual awakening. Oscar Wilde and E. M. Forster are two familiar examples among many.⁴Death in Venice assumes a prominent place among a series of texts in which travellers from Northern Europe have their sexual horizons enlarged by visiting the South.

More specifically, though, Death in Venice continues and comments on the long-standing German fascination with Greece and Greek sculpture. Sculpture is the pre-eminently classical art form. Free-standing, self-contained, detached from the spectator, the statue seems to be the ‘art object’ par excellence, best suited for the disinterested contemplation that Kant defined as the aesthetic attitude. Yet most of the statues surviving from the ancient world invite us to admire the naked human (often male) body, and such delighted contemplation is close to the sensuous desire for a living body. In particular, appreciation of sculpture can let men express covertly the homosexual desire that is officially prohibited. Does art sublimate desire, or release it? Nietzsche formulated this problem by juxtaposing Kant's definition of aesthetic experience with Stendhal's description of it as ‘une promesse de bonheur’, and asking: ‘Who is right, Kant or Stendhal?’ (GM [The Genealogy of Morals] III, §6) Mann explores the unstable relation of art and desire through his devotee of classicism, Gustav von Aschenbach.

When the story begins, Aschenbach is already a classic writer, in two of the senses which Goethe gave the term. First, he represents the type of ‘classic national author’ (‘Literarischer Sansculottismus’, G [Goethe, Werke, 14 vols.] XII, 240) which could not exist in Goethe's fragmented Germany and did not yet exist in Mann's Wilhelmine Empire. Unlike most of Mann's early protagonists, Aschenbach does not come from Lübeck or Hamburg, but from the town of ‘L.’ (Liegnitz) in Silesia. His paternal ancestors were soldiers or administrators in the service of the Prussian state which formed the core of a united Germany. And in one of his major works, dealing with Frederick the Great, Aschenbach has evoked a national subject from Prussian history. Second, he is an exemplary writer. Extracts from his works are reproduced in school readers so that schoolboys may model their style on his. It represents the ‘pure style appropriate to its subject’ (G XII, 243) which Goethe considered classical. In addition, Aschenbach is a classical writer in the obvious sense of emulating the classics. He admires, and tries to imitate, the order, balance, harmony, and restraint deemed characteristic of classical literature.

Mann himself followed this precept to the extent of emulating the classic prose of Goethe. While working on the story, he steeped himself in Goethe's later works, especially Elective Affinities. Aschenbach's infatuation with Tadzio has much in common with Eduard's love for Ottilie in Elective Affinities. Mann also drew on ‘The Man of Fifty’ in Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years, where the elderly Major has himself made up to attract his niece Hilarie (G VIII, 178); and on Goethe's actual infatuation with Ulrike von Levetzow, to whom he proposed marriage in 1823 although she was fifty-five years his junior (letter to C. M. Weber, 4 July 1920). Moreover, many formal features of Goethe's classical narratives are present in Death in Venice.⁵ The reader is distanced from the action, and allowed to form a considered judgement, by the narrator, who is not a distinct person but rather a distinct voice, sometimes close to Aschenbach, sometimes explicitly critical. The story begins in medias res, with the awakening of Aschenbach's restlessness one afternoon in Munich; only afterwards are we given an account of his previous life and career. Instead of pressing towards a climax, the narrative is retarded, as Goethe recommended, by Aschenbach's abortive attempt to leave Venice. The passage of time is blurred, making it hard to say how long Aschenbach spends under Tadzio's spell. And finally, the empirical world is not described in the fullness of detail we might expect of realism; instead, details are exploited for their symbolic value, as in the famous evocation of Venice, ‘half fairy-tale, half tourist-trap’, in Chapter 5 (VIII, 502-3).

In other respects, however, the classicism of Mann's style is qualified. He favours hyphenated adjectives, e.g. ‘feurig-festlich’ (‘fiery and festive’) (VIII, 496), hypotactic sentences, and such periphrases as ‘betagtes Fahrzeug’ (‘aged vessel’) for an old ship, ‘Kollation’ for a snack and ‘Bäderinsel’ for the Lido. However, neoclassicism is coupled with naturalistic detail. Mann evokes the jerky motion of the steamer taking Aschenbach to Venice, and the flakes of coal-dust falling on its damp deck (VIII, 461); later, in a dilapidated square, Aschenbach smells the stench of carbolic acid (VIII, 521).

Moreover, Aschenbach's deliberate classicism accompanies, and perhaps over-compensates for, his Romantic affinities. The text invites us to trace his creativity back to his mother, the daughter of an orchestral conductor from Bohemia. Music, for Mann the quintessential Romantic art, is also suggested by Aschenbach's visual resemblance to Gustav Mahler, news of whose death reached Mann just before his holiday, and by the fact that Wagner too died in Venice. Besides, Venice is a post-classical city. It originated in the fifth century AD when the inhabitants of towns along the Adriatic fled from Germanic invaders to the neighbouring islands, which they later extended and strengthened by driving wooden piles into the clay bed of the lagoon. Though happy to draw on his own stay in Venice, Mann could, had he thought it appropriate, have sent Aschenbach to Rome as well as making him a Prussian. His attraction to Venice underlines his Romantic leanings.

These two aspects of Aschenbach, the classical and the Romantic, are apparent in the biographical sketch provided by the narrator in Chapter 2. For Goethe, Schiller and their like-minded contemporaries, classicism included the physical health and harmony, the sense of being happily at home in the world, that they ascribed to the Greeks. Aschenbach is far removed from such an ideal. His health is poor. His substantial oeuvre is the product of determined self-discipline which enabled him to use all his available strength for literary work. Evidently Aschenbach's frail physical powers, including his creative energies, are controlled by an iron will. His feminine, intuitive abilities, his maternal inheritance, are under the firm guidance of his masculine, rational character: at least until the experience of homosexual love dissolves the rigid antitheses which frame his life.

Unattractive though Aschenbach's rigidity may sound, he is initially portrayed as an admirable character. In overcoming his physical weakness, he is a characteristically modern hero, with a special appeal for readers who themselves live likewise on the verge of exhaustion. We need not question the narrator's good faith at this point. After all, Mann ascribes similar qualities to the admired novelist Fontane. In his 1910 essay ‘The Old Fontane’ Mann portrays him as a nervous, irritable character who, by his own confession, wrote with difficulty, and interprets his achievement for that very reason as heroic: ‘he must have been one of those whose achievements assume heroic proportions because they think they are making no progress’ (IX, 12). The passive heroism celebrated by Aschenbach, and illustrated, in a self-referential allusion, by Thomas Buddenbrook as well as by St Sebastian, is also the quality praised by Winckelmann in the Laocoon statue, where the priest, entwined by huge snakes, is controlling his pain with dignity.

Doubts creep in, however, when we learn about Aschenbach's past. As a young man he was intent on Erkenntnis, on psychological analysis of a sceptical and cynical sort (VIII, 454). We may imagine that, like Thomas Mann, he had learnt from Nietzsche how to question conventional morality and to seek its unacknowledged motives. However, Aschenbach grew tired of constant negative questioning. He realised that too much analysis could paralyse the moral will. Instead of inviting his readers to question and learn, Aschenbach commanded them to resolve and take action. Misbehaviour like that of the protagonist of Aschenbach's story ‘Ein Elender’ (‘A Miserable Specimen’) should not be understood, still less forgiven; it should be roundly condemned. Mann's choice of words, particularly the inane repetition, suggests that Aschenbach's forceful moralism is both heavy-handed and banal: ‘The weight of words [“Die Wucht des Wortes”] with which vileness was reviled proclaimed a rejection of all moral scepticism, of any sympathy with the abyss’ (VIII, 454). As the moral content of Aschenbach's works became simpler, their form became more accomplished, with a purity, simplicity and symmetry that are recognisably classical. Their style became more refined. Subtlety and nuance were abandoned in favour of standard, polished formulae. Even in his speech, it seems, Aschenbach now follows the example of Louis XIV (no less) in avoiding all commonplace words. He is equally solemn in his devotion to writing: it is a quasi-religious act, full of fervour (‘inbrünstig’), in which his energy is made a sacrifice (‘Opfer’) to his art; he works with two candles in silver candlesticks on his desk. His dedication to his duty becomes, in artistic terms, a crude overstatement, a rejection of ambiguity and irony. Formal perfection goes with diminution of content. Yet classical restraint is only a virtue if, as with Laocoon, there is something to restrain.

Though the classical Aschenbach may be an exemplary figure to his public, he is not so to the narrator, who, however discreetly, retains the commitment to understanding (Erkenntnis) that Aschenbach himself has discarded. In the essay ‘Sweet Sleep’ (1909), Mann defines the morality of the artist:

The artist's morality is composure [‘Sammlung’], it is the power of self-centred concentration, the commitment to form, shape, limitation, corporeality, the rejection of freedom, infinity, dozing and drifting in the limitless realm of feeling—in a word, it is the will to produce a work. But how ignoble and immoral, how bloodless and repulsive is the work that is born of cold, calculating, virtuous, self-contained artistry! The artist's morality is self-abandonment, straying and self-loss, it is struggle and hardship, experience, insight and passion [‘Erlebnis, Erkenntnis und Leidenschaft’].

(XI, 338)

In this declaration, and in his critical portrayal of Aschenbach, Mann is affirming the artist's duty to inquire, to probe, to reach what will often be uncomfortable insights into human character. He is siding with artists like Fontane, whom he described as being ‘devoted not to intoxication but to insight’ (‘nicht auf den Rausch, sondern auf Erkenntnis gestellt’, IX 20). Hence Aschenbach has aptly been called an ‘anti-Fontane’.⁶

Aschenbach, however, places enthusiasm above reflection. His self-command has not extinguished his imagination. Rather, his intuitive powers have retreated from his control. He is in the situation of many people approaching middle age who, to attain success, have channelled their energy in a single direction, allowing other aspects of their personalities to wither or, more likely, to become repressed. Such a person is ripe for the ‘mid-life’ crisis, well described by Jung, in which buried aspects of their self make their presence felt through significant dreams, hallucinations and outbursts of emotion.⁷ Aschenbach's crisis begins as he is waiting for a tram in Munich, facing a stonemason's yard full of funerary monuments and a mortuary chapel adorned with epitaphs. Amid these symbols of death, suggesting his inner desiccation, he is recalled to life by the sight of an unknown male traveller, which arouses not only a sudden urge to travel but also an intensely vivid hallucination. Aschenbach's inner vision shows him a tropical swamp with ‘lascivious growth of ferns’, the ‘hairy stems of palm-trees’ and the eyes of a crouching tiger peeping through a bamboo thicket. This ‘primeval wilderness’ (‘Urweltwildnis’) (VIII, 447) could not be more different from the apparently solid edifice of Aschenbach's professional life. It is sensuous, erotic and frightening, with a suggestion, in the tiger, of brutal appetite. Although this primeval, tropical scene is distant in time and space, it reminds us that Venice too was built on a swamp.

The traveller who unleashes such an inordinate response in Aschenbach is one of a series of wanderers who cross his path. The elderly fop on the boat to Venice, made up to seem youthful, the gondolier who insists on taking Aschenbach direct to his hotel and the malevolent street musician are all described emphatically, yet none is necessary to the narrative. Why introduce them? One, inadequate, answer is that Mann actually encountered such people in Venice:

Nothing in Death in Venice is invented: the traveller by the Northern Cemetery in Munich, the gloomy boat from Pola, the aged fop, the dubious gondolier, Tadzio and his family, the departure prevented by a mix-up over luggage, the cholera, the honest clerk in the travel agency, the malevolent street singer, or whatever else you might care to mention—everything was given, and really only needed to be fitted in, proving in the most astonishing manner how it could be interpreted within my composition.

(XI, 124)

How then are these figures to be interpreted? They have often been seen as mythic figures, variously identified with the Devil and the gods Hermes and Dionysus. However, one should be wary of projecting onto the early Mann the later fascination with comparative religion and myth that finds expression above all in the Joseph tetralogy and the correspondence with Karl Kerényi, in which Mann affirmed his liking for the combination of ‘myth plus psychology’ (letter, 18 February 1941). In Death in Venice, ‘mythic’ experience is shown by the sceptical narrator to be projected onto his actual experience by the increasingly enraptured Aschenbach. If a day on the beach is ‘strangely exalted and mythically transformed’ (VIII, 496), that is because his infatuation with Tadzio colours his view of the scene around him. The wanderers who cross Aschenbach's path likewise derive their disturbing aura from his emotional projections. Not only are these figures wanderers, like Aschenbach, but they also share some of his traits: the slight build, the loose mouth and the short nose. They represent the unacknowledged and unwelcome shadow-side of Aschenbach himself, the rootless, bohemian aspect which he has done his best to repress.⁸ Jung has shown that the heightened sensibility accompanying a mid-life crisis can generate precisely such visionary embodiments of psychic forces.⁹

The story gradually reveals what Aschenbach is repressing—his power to love, his capacity for homosexual love, and the areas of experience it opens up. His repressed emotions appear just where he thought he was safest: amid his devotion to classicism.

Aschenbach first appreciates Tadzio aesthetically. On first sight, Tadzio's perfect beauty reminds him of ‘Greek sculptures of the noblest period’ (VIII, 469). Later he breaks into a classical hexameter—‘there, like a flower in bloom, his head was gracefully resting’ (VIII, 474). A long, ecstatic appreciation culminates in calling Tadzio ‘this divine sculpture’ (VIII, 490). He is specifically compared to the Spinario (Boy Extracting a Thorn), a Greek statue formerly thought to date from the fifth century BC, but now considered Hellenistic; it shows a seated boy, one leg bent over the other, intent on extracting the thorn from his foot. The figure is notable for his thick, flowing hair, like Tadzio's ‘honey-coloured hair’ (VIII, 469) and for his complete absorption in his task. His self-sufficiency recalls the self-delight ascribed to Tadzio, whose smile is that of Narcissus contemplating his own reflection (VIII, 498).¹⁰

As Aschenbach becomes infatuated with Tadzio, he tries to preserve the aesthetic character of his feelings by interpreting them in accordance with Plato's doctrine of beauty. Mann compiles a montage of quotations from classical sources, especially Plato's dialogues Phaedrus and the Symposium, to present the claim that beauty, alone among Ideas, is palpable to sight. It gives people a visible reminder of ultimate reality. Thus it links us to the higher realm as other Ideas, lacking sensible embodiment, cannot. Hence a man ‘is amazed when he sees anyone having a godlike face or form, which is the expression of divine beauty; and at first a shudder runs through him, and again the old awe steals over him’.¹¹ This experience, however, separates the wise from the merely sensual. The former practise self-control, ‘enslaving the vicious and emancipating the virtuous passions of the soul’,¹² while the latter rush straight to physical enjoyment and never attain spiritual happiness. For the Platonic ladder is like a real ladder: to reach the higher rungs, you must leave the lower ones behind.¹³

By this stringent standard, Aschenbach's Platonism is false. He thinks that in Tadzio he beholds ‘beauty itself, form as a divine idea’, ‘a mirror of intellectual beauty’ (VIII, 490); but his recollection of Plato's Phaedrus leads him, not to wisdom, but to intoxication, as the narrator makes clear by calling him ‘the enthusiast’ (‘der Enthusiasmierte’) (VIII, 51) and ‘the bewildered one’ (‘der Verwirrte’) (VIII, 503), and deploring ‘the manner of thinking of one beguiled’ (‘des Betörten Denkweise’) (VIII, 504). Love leads Aschenbach to such extravagances as stopping outside Tadzio's bedroom door and resting his forehead against the hinge ‘in complete inebriation’ (VIII, 503). Eventually it leads him into moral transgression, which we are to see, not in his homosexuality, but in his conscious decision to refrain from informing Tadzio's family that Venice is infested by cholera. In thus discovering the intricate relation between classicism in art and the experience of passion, Aschenbach is following in the footsteps of Winckelmann, Goethe and Platen, who explored the shifting boundary between aesthetic appreciation and sensual desire. Winckelmann takes male statues like the Laocoon, the Apollo Belvedere and the Antinous (representing the lover of the Emperor Hadrian) to illustrate the beautiful style, which, far from inviting cool observation, overwhelms the beholder and threatens to dissolve the firm borders of the self.¹⁴ In his tribute to Winckelmann, Goethe said that in these descriptions a normally dry writer became a poet (G XII, 120). Platen praised Winckelmann for his lyrical descriptions of sculpture, ‘breathing souls into blocks of marble’.¹⁵ Platen too expressed his own emotions indirectly by describing male statues, and later by describing actual males in statuesque language.¹⁶ Thus an ode to a beautiful male model he met in a friend's studio in Rome combines nature and art by praising the symmetry of his build with the spring-like fullness of his growing limbs; the young man's face, though, shows ‘kaltblütige Gleichmut’, the cold equanimity of an aesthetic object or, possibly, of a self-obsessed narcissist—anticipating the narcissism of Tadzio.¹⁷

Aschenbach's Venetian experience re-enacts, in different ways, Goethe's experiences in both Venice and Rome. Erotic attraction brings the classical world to life around him, as it did for the Goethe of the Roman Elegies, through his love affair (whether real or fictional does not matter here) with a young Roman woman. Similarly, as Aschenbach's infatuation mounts, classical reminiscences turn into lived experience. At first Aschenbach simply draws on his classical education for suitable quotations. Thus the spoiled Tadzio reminds him of Homer's hedonistic Phaeacians, and a line from Voss's translation of the Odyssey comes to his lips (VIII, 473). Once Aschenbach has yielded to his passion, however, the surrounding world is subjectively transfigured into mythic grandeur. Classical references are frequent and dense in section 4: the sun becomes ‘the god with fiery cheeks’ (VIII, 486), the waves are Poseidon's horses (VIII, 496), Aschenbach feels transported to the Elysian Fields (VIII, 488), and Tadzio, playing ball, is identified by Aschenbach with the boy Hyacinth, loved by both Apollo and the West Wind (VIII, 496). Goethe too, in a famous passage, finds his appreciation of sculpture heightened by intimacy with his beloved's body (G I, 160).

There is, however, a more specific association between Aschenbach and Goethe. Goethe's visit to Venice in spring 1790 gave rise to the Venetian Epigrams. Here Mann found the famous comparison of a black gondola to a coffin (VIII, 464; G I, 176). More centrally, several epigrams celebrate a group of street acrobats, including a preternaturally agile girl called Bettina. Watching them as a tourist, Goethe is in a position like that of Aschenbach watching Tadzio and his friends. Moreover, Bettina's appeal comes partly from her boyishness. She reminds him of the ‘boys’ in paintings by Bellini and Veronese; when she stands on her hands with her legs (and bottom) pointing skywards, Goethe pretends to fear that the sight will attract Jupiter away from his boy-lover Ganymede.¹⁸ Goethe was tolerant towards male homosexuality. In a conversation recorded in 1830, he remarked that pederasty (Knabenliebe), even if against Nature, was part of Nature.¹⁹ It has been suggested that a homosexual encounter formed part of his sexual awakening on his Italian journey.²⁰

For Aschenbach, the balance between art and desire soon tips towards physical passion. The prospect of Venice laid waste by cholera, with law and order collapsing, opens up dim, unformulated, but exciting possibilities. Rather than relinquish these, Aschenbach will take the risk that both he and his supposedly beloved Tadzio will die of cholera. This conscious decision releases violent unconscious forces in a horribly vivid dream, in which men and women, with sinister ululations, dance round a gigantic wooden phallus and copulate promiscuously.

In this orgy we see the unacknowledged underside of Aschenbach's classicism. For its participants are worshipping the god Dionysus, and such rites, in which intoxication (Aschenbach's ‘Rausch’) is taken to such extremes as incest and self-mutilation, are attested from classical sources. Mann took the details from a study of Greek religion, Psyche, by the classical scholar Erwin Rohde.²¹ But he had already encountered this shadow-side of classicism in the work of Rohde's friend Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, in which the sunlit world of Greek sculpture, called ‘Apolline’, is contrasted with the dark, violently sensual, ‘Dionysiac’ world that finds expression especially in music. A civilised Greek had to accept that ‘his whole existence, with all its beauty and moderation, rested on a concealed underground of suffering and insight [Erkenntnis], which was disclosed by that Dionysiac element’ (BT [The Birth of Tragedy] §4). It was only in the experience of tragedy, Nietzsche argued, that these two discordant truths, the truth of Apollo and the truth of Dionysus, could be held together in a single thought.

Thus Death in Venice examines the precarious balance between two forces. On the one hand, we have ‘classical’ clarity and control; on the other, the sensuous pleasure which forms part of the experience of art, which can grow into love, and which, sometimes in frightening and destructive forms, is also part of classicism. Too rigorous control can swerve into its opposite, self-abandonment. Mann's ideal of critical understanding (Erkenntnis) may offer a way of holding both together.

Notes

1. To Carl Maria Weber, 4 July 1920. On the background, see Anthony Heilbut, Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature (New York: Knopf, 1995), esp. p. 247.

2. See Hans Rudolf Vaget, ‘Thomas Mann und die Neuklassik. Der Tod in Venedig und Samuel Lublinskis Literaturauffassung’, Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schiller-Gesellschaft 17 (1973), 432-54.

3. Lionel Gossman, ‘Death in Trieste’, Journal of European Studies 22 (1992), 207-40 (p. 214).

4. See Robert Aldrich, The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy (London: Routledge, 1993).

5. Discussed (with reference to Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years) by Wolfdietrich Rasch, ‘Die klassische Erzählkunst Goethes’, in Hans Steffen (ed.), Formkräfte der deutschen Dichtung vom Barock bis zur Gegenwart (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1963), pp. 81-99.

6. Joyce Crick, ‘Thomas Mann: How Late is Late?’, Publications of the English Goethe Society 68 (1998), 29-44 (p. 33).

7. See Anthony Stevens, On Jung (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 164-5.

8. See Heidi M. and Robert J. R. Rockwood, ‘The Psychological Reality of Myth in Der Tod in Venedig’, Germanic Review 59 (1984), 137-41.

9. Stevens, On Jung, p. 175.

10. For an illustrated account of this figure, see Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 308-10.

11. Phaedrus, 251a, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. B. Jowett, 4th edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), III, 158.

12. Phaedrus, 256a-b, in The Dialogues of Plato, III, 163.

13. See T. J. Reed, Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 156-71; the doctrine ascribed to Socrates is summarised in the social context of Greek homosexual practice by K. J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (London: Duckworth, 1978), pp. 160-5.

14. See Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), esp. p. 128.

15. Sonnet 32, ‘An Winckelmann’, in Platen, Lyrik (Munich: Winkler, 1982), pp. 384-5.

16. See Wolfgang Adam, ‘Sehnsuchts-Bilder: Antike Statuen und Monumente in Platens Lyrik’, Euphorion 80 (1986), 363-89.

17. Platen, Lyrik, p. 463.

18. Goethe, Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche (Frankfurt: Deutsche Klassiker Verlag, 1986-), I, 451.

19. Ibid., XXXVIII, 249.

20. Sander L. Gilman, ‘Goethe's Touch’, in his Inscribing the Other (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), pp. 29-49.

21. For Mann's excerpts from Rohde, see his work-notes in Thomas Mann: ‘Der Tod in Venedig’. Text, Materialien, Kommentar, ed. T. J. Reed (Munich: Hanser, 1983), pp. 92-3.

Works Cited

Berlin, Jeffrey B. (ed.), Approaches to Teaching Mann's ‘Death in Venice’ and Other Short Fiction (New York: Modern Languages Association of America, 1992).

Gronicka, André von, ‘“Myth plus Psychology”: a Style Analysis of Death in Venice’, Germanic Review 31 (1956), 191-205.

Reed, T. J., Death in Venice: Making and Unmaking a Master, Twayne's Masterwork Series no. 140 (New York: Twayne, 1994).

‘The Frustrated Poet: Homosexuality and Taboo in Der Tod in Venedig’, in David Jackson (ed.), Taboos in German Literature (Oxford and Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1996), pp. 119-34.

Reed, T. J. (ed.), Der Tod in Venedig, Blackwell's German Texts (London: Duckworth; Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1996). German text with detailed introduction and notes in English.

Rockwood, Heidi M. and Robert J. R., ‘The Psychological Reality of Myth in Der Tod in Venedig’, Germanic Review 59 (1984), 137-41.

Vaget, Hans R., ‘Film and Literature. The Case of Death in Venice: Luchino Visconti and Thomas Mann’, German Quarterly 53 (1980), 159-75.